Software for use on personal computers and mainframe terminals today is often touted as providing user ease and as having component based simplification. Instead, the reality is that complexity in such is daunting and continues to escalate. In such systems there are many things to memorize, and great inconsistencies which complicate this. Further, the overall visualization of one's working circumstances and the interrelations of files and directories in such systems are difficult for everyone.
Attempts to unify (so-called "integrated software") have been hampered by the difficulty of finding any kind of conceptual unification. One unifying visualization, the spreadsheet, has been greatly influential in this regard, partly because it brought a new overview of data. But because of spreadsheet's rectangular constraints--the idea that the data structure itself must somehow correspond to a rectangular array, itself on a sheet of paper--larger spreadsheets become less and less visualizable or useful, with more and more necessary empty space. Using such existing approaches, unified data thus becomes artificially disconnected, and forced into hierarchical structures and conventional files, which in turn become increasingly tangled.
At the operating system level, computer simplification has been pursued through such mechanisms as "icons" and "metaphors" in the much-praised interfaces of the MACINTOSH.TM. and WINDOWS.TM., but most of the functions in these systems must be reached in other ways, particularly through the memorization of many unrelated commands and functions.
At the applications level, the distinctions among software types, e.g., "word processing," "spreadsheet," "database," etc., are more apparent than real. But despite this, software today is largely inconsistent and divided into dissimilar "applications," meaning isolated areas of function. These have been built around what have become traditions and expectations of computer work and filing. But even within those traditions, the present inventor believes that what is needed is a consistent and principled basis for information work, allowing data to be connected according to its own real shape, and allowing it to be visualized as flexibly as possible.
The above discussion of personal computers and mainframe terminals is, however, just a small part of a very rapidly increasing problem today. As computers have been reduced to microprocessors, and as such microprocessors are increasingly integrated into appliances other than computers, the need to deal with information work in these contexts arises as well. Two very ready examples of microprocessor based appliances that need improved information work capability are video cassette recorders (VCRs) and microwave ovens. In these complex everyday appliances, navigating the control menus and inputting user data are forms of information work which large numbers of existing and potential users simply find impossible to master. These are tasks which are basically well within the intellectual capability of the users, put which existing systems have so complicated that the uses are overwhelmed.
While much work on the hardware of appliance interfaces needs to be done, and examples such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) are increasingly showing that such is possible, the problem will not be solved until users can visualize what they are doing within such interfaces. But today's large, and largely empty, rectangular data structures are not going to be able to do this, particularly not in small appliance interfaces.
Accordingly, what is needed today is a consistent structure for the rich visualization and easy manipulation of complex data.